Senator and republican presidential candidate John McCain recently had drama with youtube.  Basically, his videos were being pulled from youtube for the same copyright mechanisms within the DMCA he voted for.  His theory is that some sorts of videos deserve extra attention because to prevent their viewing, you are hurting voter’s ability to judge candidates; indirectly, you’re hurting the democratic process.  This whole thing is rediculous.

But what’s interesting about this is that McCain is feeling hurt from a law he supported.  When the shoe’s on the other foot, it feels different.  I would hope that instead of trying to make special cases, he’d instead realize that there are either some flaws with the overreaching power of the DMCA, or accept it and host the videos on his own servers, free of youtube’s takedown policies, but at the cost of viewership.

Personally, I think copyright law is a difficult thing.  It’s expensive to manage and defend.  It offers low value in return for high costs to content producers to defend their copyright works against all violations without tools like google has provided.  Yet, with google’s tools, it has come at the cost of free culture.  Is there even a balance that can be struck that is fair to both the copyright holders and the content producers that minimizes time spent in court, paying lawyers?